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In Deep: Bury My Heart at Rising Seas [1]

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Date: 2023-01-22

For quite a while, science has raised the specter of change for the worse. In 1988, then-NASA physicist/climate scientist James Hansen confirmed suspicions that had been unveiled by such forerunners as Eunice Foote. Svante Arrhenius. John Tyndall. Guy Callendar. Gilbert Plass. And Edward Teller.

Tyndall, Plass, and Teller were physicists. Arrhenius was a physicist/chemist. Callendar was an engineer. Foote was a woman who, as such, found herself a ‘pioneer without portfolio’- to the point she died unpublished (in 1888).

Seventy years later, Dr. Teller extrapolated fossil fuel use into the future (aka now). To his chagrin, he saw greenhouse efflux heating the atmosphere to the point it would melt, undermine, and unhinge polar ice.

So, seas would rise. At length, they would submerge (quoting him) “all coastal cities...and, since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions,” the damage would be “more serious than most people tend to believe.”

Apparently, we couldn’t handle the truth. These days, as a leader of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, glaciologist Ted Scambos sees the ITGC’s subject matter swooning into Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea within several years.

While boosting sea level by two feet, that debacle stands to leave a 74,000 square mile gap in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet- into which will rush a (relatively) warm bath of seawater.

To Dr. Scambos, that incursion bodes Thwaites effectively “dragging the West Antarctic ice with it.”

Not to let the cataclysm out of the bag, but that broader collapse looks to raise the briny deep by another 8 feet (or so).

Here’s the thing. Even a relatively modest rise of 6 feet (above early 2023 levels) would wreak the havoc Dr. Teller projects. Indeed, “coastal cities” would vanish. According to a map credited to PLOS One, so would most of Florida. Delaware. New Jersey. And Maryland (plus the land it donated for the site of our nation’s capital).

What won’t disappear is a world-wide feedback loop. Namely, the more water, the more melting. The more melting, the more water. (And so on.)

Coming soon. To a seafloor-in-progress near you.

THE END

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/22/2147853/-In-Deep-Bury-My-Heart-at-Rising-Seas

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